New Jersey man says long-lost Picasso worth $13 million was found in his aunt's crawlspace

Carl Sabatino believes that the artwork he found underneath his aunt's sewing machine at her home in Staten Island is a long-lost Picasso painting worth millions.

He's been brushed off before, but Carl Sabatino believes a work of unearthed from his aunt's crawlspace in Staten Island is a long lost Picasso worth more than $10 million.

The New Jersey broadcast executive is now on a mission to prove the piece he found stashed under his late aunt's sewing machine is a recreation of Pablo Picasso's "Woman with a Cape" that the artist rendered himself decades after his original, Sabatino told the Daily News.

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He said his aunt Jenny Verastro likely suspected the work's pedigree and pointed him to her hidden treasure while lying on her deathbed in March 2004.

The recreation now is being analyzed by a forensic expert in Washington who hopes to make a definitive comparison with a Picasso fingerprint taken from a plaster cast of the painter's hand.

(courtesy)

"Three days before she passed on, she told me, 'Don't forget, Carl, to look under the sewing machine,'" he recalled.

"As I moved the sewing machine, it came sliding right out into my lap. I was stunned," he said. "I found it wrapped in newspaper. That started this adventure 12 years ago."

Sabatino said his uncle Nicky Verastro purchased the artwork in 1944 from a street vendor in London for about $10 while serving as a soldier during World War II.

He suspects it came from a nearby gallery that had been bombed or looted.

The work depicts a woman in an elaborate, feathered hat and is an obvious replica of Picasso's 1901 painting "Woman with a Cape" that hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

An expert at Christie's in New York dismissed Sabatino's version as a cheap knock-off when she met him at his lawyer's office shortly after the sewing machine discovery, he said.

"She examined it for about 30 seconds and literally flipped it back at me and said, 'This is a $10 poster, don't waste your time,'" he recalled.

"I said, 'Okay, but where did it come from in your opinion? It's in color,'" he recalled.

Color photography and printing were exotic mediums in war-plagued Europe at that time, he said.

"She gave me a deer-in-the-headlights look. She didn't have an answer," he said of the Christie's expert.

"This is a treasure hunt for me, for the love of my family," Sabatino told The News on Friday. (WNBC)

Sabatino started researching Pablo Picasso and found evidence he experimented with a color printing technique that involved gum bichromate in 1936.

Sabatino turned to an art analyst named Dr. Kenneth Smith, president of the Center for Art Materials Analysis in Westmont, Ill., to see if the materials used in his piece matched his theory.

Smith used a needle to extract some pigment and studied it under a microscope, according to NBC 4 News, which first reported the story.

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He found it was consistent with materials used in Europe in the 1930s and also verified that a partial right thumb print was left on the work, possibly left by Picasso himself, Sabatino said.

The recreation now is being analyzed by a forensic expert in Washington who hopes to make a definitive comparison with a Picasso fingerprint taken from a plaster cast of the painter's hand.

Sabatino also got an art appraiser specializing in Picasso pieces to hang his reputation on his belief the Staten Island find is the real deal.

"This is a treasure hunt for me, for the love of my family," Sabatino told The News on Friday. "This is a story of redemption for my family. They protected this and bequeathed it to me to find the truth."